Best for Dr. Malvin Parker as well as for me. Were it not for Billingsley Loring’s genius at industrial promotion, Parker would be just another crackpot inventor wearing out chairs in one office anteroom after another.
Yes, for well over a quarter-century I’ve found it profitable to humor his whims and so when he challenged me to make it impossible for anyone to enter this room in his laboratory-dwelling, I proceeded to do so without asking the questions I knew he’d refuse to answer.
There were no windows, of course, and the ventilating outlets were screened with fine wire mesh welded in place. I had my men strip the chamber to its structural plasticrete and spray all its surfaces with transparent Loring Instant-Dry Quikenam. The single door was fitted with another of Parker’s devices, a phonolock which I myself set to a keyword I confided to no one. It opened inward, moreover, so that with my back planted against it, no one could enter without pushing me aside.
In the harsh glare of the cold-light strip edging the ceiling, the uniform grayness robbed the room of shape and dimension. It was an illimitable, terrifying vastness. It closed in on me so tightly I could not move, could scarcely breathe. If only there were some detail; even only a shadow for my eyes to seize upon. If only there were some sound—
There was sound, a sourceless drone barely audible. There was a shadow; the shadow of a shadow so tenuous I could not make out if it was right on top of me, on the opposite wall or in between.
Malvin Parker stood in the center of the room! He couldn’t possibly have gotten in here. He was here, undeniably, his great grizzled head hunched forward on the habitually bowed shoulders of his bearlike hulk, a triumphant smile flickering in the deep-sunk dark pools of his eyes. He—The answer came to me. “Oh, no, Mal Parker. You can’t fool with a tri-dimensional video image of yourself.”
“I suppose not,” his projected voice sighed but on his pictured face that smile of his deepened. “I wouldn’t try.”
The apparition stepped forward, grabbed my forearm with gnarled and very tangible fingers.
“Does that feel like a video image?”
“Urggh!” I jerked loose, butted him with my shoulder, so hard that despite his greater height and weight he staggered side-ward. My throat clamped as I goggled at a brown flurry of lab coat, at a leg and foot—
The rest of Malvin Parker had vanished!
He at once reappeared, looking a little scared.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Billiken.” That nickname, underlying my shortness and rotundity, was like it slap in my face and he knew it. “You might have electrocuted me.”
“Electrocuted! With what? There’s nothing but empty space here.”
“Right, Billiken. But there are plenty of bare high voltage leads where I am.”
“Where are you?” I gagged. He had appeared in a room it was utterly impossible to enter, he’d proved to me that he was indubitably here, now he told me he was somewhere else. “Where the devil are you?”
“In my electronics laboratory, a floor above you. What you’re gaping at is—well, you might call it a material image.”
“I might,” I flung back, hoarsely. “But I don’t know why. It sounds like gobbledygook to me.”
He chuckled again, enjoying my discomfiture. “Look, Billiken. You’re familiar with the principles of tele—” He broke off, looked to the right at something I could not see, or at someone! For he was saying, “Just a moment, dear. I’m talking with Bill Loring,” and I knew who it was. Only two persons could have brought that tender affection to his seamed countenance. One of them, his wife Neva, died eight years ago.
“I don’t see why not,” he responded to a voice I could not hear, and turned back to me. “That irreverent daughter of mine suggests that we continue our discussion over drinks in her sitting room. What do you say?”
I said it was a good idea, and meant it with my whole soul. I wanted desperately to get out of this blasted room where I talked with a man who insisted he wasn’t there.
“Very well.” He nodded. “We’ll meet you there.”
He disappeared again. For good.
The room was just as it had been when I locked myself into it, the ventilator screens unbroken, the paint film unmarred. Unless I’d been hypnotized by the droning sound, which had now cut off the door that swung open as I spoke the keyword was opening for the first time since I’d closed myself in here alone.
But my biceps still ached from the grip of Malvin Parker’s fingers, digging in.
Better than he could suspect, I knew the way to the jewelcase-like boudoir Neva designed to set off her fragile, almost ethereal beauty. My breath caught in a sudden poignant twinge of recollection as Sherry Parker smiled at me from the chair where she presided over a gleaming Autobar. She was her mother at twenty all over again; the same cameo features, the same glowing, amber hair, the same golden skin.
“Uncle Billiken!” she exclaimed. “You’re an old meanie staying away from me for months.”
“Now, now, my dear,” I chuckled indulgently. “You haven’t missed me an iota. Not,” I cocked, an eyebrow at the two youths who hovered over her, “with so much pleasanter companions than an old codger like me.”
“Oh these!” She pouted prettily. “These are just Dad’s assistants. Robin Adlair.” The burly, fair-haired chap to whom she gestured grinned down at me. “And Bart Murtry.”
“This is an honor, Mr. Loring.” Murtry was only slightly taller than myself, narrow-faced, his hair black as Sheol, his black eyes sultry. “You’ve been my inspiration ever since I read Lorne Randall’s Colossus of Commerce as a kid. That’s a great book, sir, about a great man.”
“Yes, the book’s a good job.” It ought to be. I’d paid Randall plenty to write it. “Nice to have you with the organization, Mr. Murtry.” I turned back to Sherry. “May I have a Martini, my dear? No bitters.”
Sherry smiled and nodded at me.
“And no olive. I haven’t forgotten, Uncle Billiken.” Somehow I didn’t mind her calling me that, perhaps because it reminded me how Neva and I used to laugh, in this very room, over what her baby tongue made of Billingsley. “By the way, Dad asked me to tell you that he’ll be right in. He stopped to make some notes.”
Her slim fingers twirled dials atop the sculptured silver chest that sat on a low table before her and it started to whirr softly.
“You know, Mr. Loring,” Murtry said. “That Autobar epitomizes for me the difference between you and Dr. Parker. He invented the mechanism that concocts any beverage you set the dials to and delivers it in precisely the right glass at precisely the right temperature, but what did he have when he was through? An ugly and expensive contrivance whose sale would have been limited to a few hotels and restaurants.
“It took you to have casings designed for it that blend with any decor and engineering techniques that brought its cost within the budget of the average family. And then you had your advertising and public relations staff put on a campaign that made it something without which no home could be considered well-appointed. You transformed the demand for it from a few thousands to millions.”
“That’s right, my boy. That’s the story.”
“But not all of it, Bart,” the blond Adlair drawled, his high-cheekboned, blunt-jawed face naive to my quick glance. “Billingsley Loring didn’t take any risk in exploiting the demand he created. What he did, as he always does with new and untried products, was to turn over the Autobar patent to a corporation set up for the purpose and which, while he still held control, contracted with Loring Enterprises to manufacture the contraption on a cost-plus basis and to sell it as sole agent. If it had been a failure the loss would have been the Autobar Company’s stockholders’. Since it succeeded, the major portion of the profits go to Loring Enterprises. To Billingsley Loring.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Murtry demanded.
“Did I say anything was wrong with it?” Adlair spread big hands almost as acid-stained as Parker’s, blue eyes innocent. �
��I merely mentioned it because Lorne Randall left it out of the chapter in his book from which you cribbed what you’ve just said.”
“Cribbed!” White spots pitted the wing-tips of the other youth’s nostrils. “Why you rat!”
“Bart!” Sherry exclaimed, a warning note in her voice. And then, “It’s time for the Comedy Players, Bart. Turn them on for me, like a good boy. Please.”
CHAPTER II
Industrial Giant
Now there, I thought, as he went across the room, is a young man who might be more useful to me than puttering his time away in a laboratory. He thumbed a switch. On the wall an oblong brightened, took on depth and perspective. The scene was a moonlit garden filled with soft music from an unseen orchestra.
Quarter life-size but otherwise convincingly real-seeming, a girl in a diaphanous evening dress strolled into it, a tuxedoed youth close behind. I didn’t hear what they were saying because Malvin Parker entered just then and came toward me.
“About time you showed up,” I growled. “Do you think I’ve got nothing to do but stand around waiting for you?”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound it. “I was delayed. Thank you.” He took the filled wineglass Adlair had brought to him. “Port, eh? Just what I need.” The blond chap handed me my cocktail. “Robin,” Parker said, “is my good right hand, Billiken.”
“So I rather imagined.” Seeing the two together, I realized how much alike they were. Not physically, except for their height, but in another, more significant way. I didn’t like this Adlair. “What about the monkey business you pulled in that room, Mal? How did you get in and out of it?”
“I told you that I wasn’t in it, except in somewhat the same sense Lilli Denton and Storm Rand,” he gestured to the screen, “are in this one.”
“Oh, come now. Those images look and sound real enough but if I went over there and tried to touch them, I’d feel only the wall. Back there I not only heard and saw you. I felt you.”
Parker’s taunting smile was back in his eyes. “No, Billiken. You did not feel me. Look. The images you see on that video screen are complexes of colored light produced, in the apparatus behind it. They are so modulated by impulses broadcast from a studio a thousand miles away, as to affect your retina in the same way it would be by light reflected directly from the persons and objects depicted. What you hear is sound produced in that same apparatus and similarly modulated to affect your ears in the same way as sounds produced in that studio.”
“Thanks for the lecture on video,” I snapped. “But what’s it got to do with the subject?”
“The principle is the same.
“The devil it is. Light is energy. The electromagnetic force actuating the loudspeaker is energy. You can modulate energy by energy transmitted from a remote source so as to give me the illusion of seeing and hearing objects located at that source. You can’t give me the illusion of feeling something I don’t actually touch.”
Parker’s grizzled eyebrows arched quizzically.
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t feel energy.” Adlair, I noticed, had gone back to the girl. They were laughing together at some banter from the screen and Murtry, beside me, watched them with smoldering eyes. “I can feel only something material and you can’t create matter, much less modulate it from a distance to seem what it is not.”
“No? Remember the mole you used to have on your cheek, Billiken?”
I remembered it. I remembered how it had bothered Neva. “What about it?”
“You had it removed by what’s called knifeless surgery. Nothing material touched your flesh: High-frequency waves, pure energy, sliced away a bit of your bodily tissue as efficiently as the most material of steel scalpels could have. Is there any reason energy in some such form might not affect other bits of tissue in ways similar to that in which they are affected by matter?”
I couldn’t think of any. I had to admit so, grudgingly.
“Now,” Parker smiled, “when you say you ‘feel’ an object, you really mean that certain specialized bits of your bodily tissue, the nerve endings in your skin, are affected in ways your brain learned in early infancy to mean that they are in contact with matter having certain physical properties; hardness, form, texture, temperature which sum up to a certain mental concept—the object in question. If those same nerve endings are affected in precisely the same way by, say, some form of energy, would that not mean to your brain that they are in contact with that same object?”
“Well, probably.”
“And if at the same time you seemed to see and hear that object the illusion would be complete, would it not? The illusion, for instance, that I was actually, physically present in a room I could not possibly enter.”
So the apparition with which I’d wrestled had been as unreal, as insubstantial as the boy and girl locked in closed embrace on the video screen across the room.
“From apparatus on the other side of the wall,” Parker explained, “which was permeable to the range of frequencies I used, I projected a tri-dimensional video image of myself plus a complex of energies that affected your sensory-nerve endings as the surfaces of my body and its clothing would have. Your own brain did the rest.”
“It certainly did. I could have sworn—Hold it,” I interrupted myself. “How could I throw an—an illusion around?” I’d recalled how I’d flung him from me, how all of him but his leg had vanished. “How could I almost electrocute an image?”
“Not you, Billiken. It was your image that came within an ace of throwing me against a live busbar in my lab above you. Your see, I had a transmitter scanning you too so that I could watch your reactions.” His eye-corners crinkled with puckish amusement. “You should have seen the expression on your face when I suddenly appeared to you.”
“It must have been very funny.” The Martini I sipped was acrid. Sherry must have put in the bitters after all. “That’s a neat gadget you’ve trumped up, Mal.” I made myself sound admiring. “One of the neatest you’ve ever produced.” And then I let him have it. “But what good is it?”
He stared at me as if I’d spoken in some unintelligible language. “What good?”
“Precisely. What are its commercial possibilities? How can I make a profit out of it?
“Why, I don’t know,” Parker stammered, his eyes satisfactorily miserable. “I—Well, it was a challenging problem and I worked it out.”
“On my time and at my expense. So suppose you get busy now and work out something this cute trick of yours can do that people will pay money for. Some practical use it can be put to that isn’t already being served by conventional video.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his daughter and on his seamed countenance was the almost pleading expression that used to be there when he’d look at his wife as I dressed him down. Neva would laugh a little and then tell him that even if he didn’t owe it to me to be practical, he did to her. Sherry’s velvet-red lips parted but before she could speak, Bart Murtry forestalled her.
“May I make a suggestion, Mr. Loring?”
“Of course, my boy. The Loring organization’s all one big, happy family. Nothing pleases me more than if one of my—er—children, so to speak, comes up with a good, workable idea.”
Robin Adlair had decided to take an interest, was coming toward us. “What you said just now,” Murtry continued, “reminded me that video is not a perfect advertising medium. It can only tell its audience about a product and show them what it looks like. With this new invention you can permit people actually to handle things—woman’s hats, for instance.” The black eyes were glowing. “Let the average woman try a becoming hat on and she won’t be able to resist buying it. The same for dresses. And as for men—they could actually shave with the razor blade you want to sell them, write with a new kind of fountain pen, even try out the controls of a helicopter or roadcar. The possibilities are limitless.”
“Very good, my boy. Excellent. I can see our prospectus now. The Loring—er—Tele
seller puts your product into the nation’s homes!”
“Bunk.”
I wheeled to Adlair, from whom the interruption had come. “You insolent young whippersnapper! How dare you call anything I say bunk?”
“Because that’s what it is,” he drawled, grinning at me. “You can’t put anyone’s product into even one home till you’ve got a receiver there. Who’s going to fill a room with apparatus just so they can try on hats or shave with razors that disappear the instant they turn off the current?”
“Fill a room, nothing,” Murtry snapped, glaring at the blond fellow as if he very cheerfully could wring his neck. “It can be engineered down to convenient size.”
“Maybe, Bart. Maybe it can, but you still can’t engineer out the extra tubes and coils and condensers that always will run up its cost to double that of a video which will give its owner exactly as much information and entertainment. You—”
“That’s it!” Mal Parker’s exclamation cut Adlair short. “That’s the moneymaking angle you’re looking for, Billiken. Entertainment.”
This was something new, Parker offering an idea for making money. “Go ahead, Mal,” I encouraged him, silkily. It would be ridiculous, of course, and I’d have another chance to slap him down. “Tell us about it. What sort of entertainment video can’t present as well?”
“A sort these youngsters, wouldn’t know anything about because tri-dimensional video killed it before they were old enough to be entertained by anything except a rattle. Look, Billiken. Has any show video has brought to you ever given you anywhere near the kick we used to get sitting in the balcony of the old Bijou Theater? Wasn’t there something we got not from the performers but from the audience? Didn’t sharing our emotions with a thousand others physically present heighten our own emotions?”
“Mass hysteria,” I grunted. “Crowd psychology—crowd!” I caught up the word. “Those old shows certainly did pull in the crowds and they paid. They paid plenty, but the huge wages offered actors and actresses by the video companies made it impossible—Hold on!” The nape of my neck puckered with the chill prickles of inspiration. “This thing of yours—there’s no limit to the number of material images it can recreate from one prototype, is there?”
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 46
